1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention relates to the field of graphics and imaging, and more specifically, to object representation.
2. Description of Related Art
Representation of three-dimensional (3-D) objects has a number of applications such as graphics, image processing, solid modeling, and computational geometry, etc. Due to the complexity of 3-D objects, it is important that the representation be efficient to allow fast processing or reduced storage requirements.
Existing techniques to represent graphical or image objects have a number of drawbacks. Most existing techniques represent object data in terms of their coordinates with respect to a coordinate system. For three-dimensional objects, the representation requires values of the coordinates for each data point on the object to be computed and stored. This representation scheme requires a large amount of storage and computational efforts. Other techniques utilize a hierarchical scheme where the object is represented at several levels of hierarchy (e.g., resolution) using reduced representation such as octree. These techniques require complex data structures or computation efforts to traverse the trees through the hierarchy.